Who is your main inspiration in the language learning world?

[Axon]

When I first got started around 2013 I only watched a couple of YouTube polyglots. Moses McCormick was a big inspiration for his willingness to constantly go out and talk to people around him. His videos also made me realize how many people there were speaking so many languages all over the place. I still think he's great, but as I understand most of the languages he speaks now, the novelty has worn off a bit and I only watch his videos every so often.

Around 2014 I started actually studying linguistics, and was captivated by what I read about Ken Hale, for all the reasons nooj mentioned above. I'll always remember this quote from his memorial page: "If Ken had turned his focus to gunsmithing, his guns would have ended up behind glass in the Smithsonian." In my Indonesian class we had to do a short oral report on a famous person from our respective countries and I did mine on him.

Next there's James "Mike" "Glossika" Campbell. Something about that guy just absolutely fascinates me and I have spent way too much time reading everything he's ever written and scouring the internet for any videos of his still left online. To me he represents a total extreme of being a language learner, with apparently everything he's done for the last twenty years or more been about language learning or teaching in some way. He has unique ideas, but more importantly he has the drive to see them through no matter if it takes five years to even get them off the ground.

And of course the people on this forum. This is a wonderful place, and I'm not even going to name any names because I can't list you all in a single post.

[Kamlari]

Here's my idol:
https://youtu.be/qgdUJBRX76w?t=339
Just do it! That's the attitude I admire.

[Chung]

I don't have idols among the polyglots or linguists either. There are certain people though, living and dead, who make me think and keep me both grounded and striving to be better at life in generaI.

For the topic at hand, it comes from realizing (accepting?) that learning foreign languages is now just gravy in my life. I'm not into it like tarvos or Iversen, let alone doing this with a whiff of savior complex like Kenneth Hale (I do see and act on the value of learning or exploring a minority language or two (or three) as he did, but do it for personal enlightenment at my pace instead of being, as Noam Chomsky once put it in reference to Hale, "a voice for the voiceless"). On a similar note, a Couchsurfer whom I quite respect for being a scholar of Finno-Ugric linguistics (and polyglot) is ultimately a Couchsurfer with whom I had the good fortune of meeting and staying over - not some object of worship.

I'm here to cultivate my interests, be true to myself, and just not drop the ball on my shift. Do you like languages? Very cool. No? Life goes on.

[garyb]

I've never really followed the whole "polyglot community" so I don't recognise a lot of the names, but I'd repeat a few already mentioned.

I'm not a fan of Benny these days, but when I first got into languages his blog was inspiring rather than the constant sales-pitch it's become in recent years and his interests lined up with mine at the time - travel and conversation - while everyone else seemed to have a more academic or literary focus.

Luca has always seemed very down-to-earth and genuine, and one of the rare ones who has a truly high level in a good number of languages rather than just being great at a couple and then claiming to also be advanced at the rest in their families too, as happens more often. Not that having a couple of strong languages and knowing even the basics in a dozen others isn't an amazing achievement, of course, but the dishonesty makes me lose some respect. Luca seems the real deal, although I realise that he and his peers basically study languages full-time so it's not fair to idolise them or compare them to spare-time learners like most of us.

Richard Simcott goes without saying!

[Deinonysus]

- and Luca Lampariello, for his gift with pronunciation and methods.

I want to know more about Luca's gift with pronunciation, because as far as I know, he mainly depends on the traditional method of bidirectional translation. I only listened to him when he speaks English, and I think his accent is OK but not that outstanding. Can you clarify more?

He gives away that he's a non-native English speaker every fourth word or so, but it's still a remarkably good accent. Don't underestimate how difficult it is to get an accent that good without growing up speaking the language. He doesn't just get most of the sounds right most of the time, he also gets the prosody right, and English prosody is very, very different from Italian prosody.

His French and German accents are also excellent, although because I'm not quite fluent in either one, I can't really tell if there is anything that gives him away as a non-native speaker like his English.

As an opera fan, I can tell you that Italian singers are notoriously bad at pronouncing French and German. There are a lot of sounds and sound combinations that don't exist in Italian, there are plenty of words that end in consonants, and just as with English, the prosody is very different. But Luca gets these just right, at least as far as I can tell.

[tarvos]

I've seen Luca work his magic in person, and he is very good with accents given the ramifications of his native Italian (he doesn't suffer from problems with consonant clusters or consonants in coda, for example). He gives specific workshops on phonetics at events (this is one of his specialties), especially focusing on intonation. And I think his English accent is great. It's not perfect, but he's definitely lost all the traces of the stereotypical Italian accent when speaking English. It's not dissimilar to me speaking Spanish - I don't sound entirely native in Spanish, of course, but I don't have a thick, typical Dutch (or anglophone) accent. That's pretty much what you should be aiming before - true perfection isn't necessary. I don't claim to speak Japanese or Korean without an accent either, let alone something like Mandarin, but it's much easier for me to hide my origins than it is for someone whose origin is clearly defined by their lack of adaptation to the phonology of the foreign language, and more importantly, its intonation patterns.

His accents are excellent in French, German, and Spanish. In Dutch he has a few things that are a bit weird, but it's no hindrance and doesn't mark him as Italian or anglophone.

And I've attended his workshops; they're great, especially for beginners. I don't have the time, energy or memory to go into detail on them, but you should try visiting them sometime.

[Iversen]

I don't believe in having heroes, but there are two persons I would like to mention. The first is one of my teachers at the Romance Institute of Århus University, where I studied French and (unofficially) also several other languages during the late 70s. He was not only a noteworthy polyglot - the only one I have met who actually could SPEAK Old French - but also, and more importantly, the main influence on my ideas about grammar. The second is Alexander Arguëlles, not so much because of his concrete techniques, but because I had been neglecting language learning completely from 1982 to around 2006 when I more or less by accident hit upon the HTLAL forum, where Arguelles still was an active participant. And it was primarily his immense knowledge and serious attitude to language learning that convinced me that it might be worth taking up language learning again.

I could add many other scholars and language learners, some of whom I have met at the gatherings and conferences or as contributors to the forums, but then this post could be very long and tedious. Instead I would like to hail the acribic old scholars who only by hand, without computers, compiled the grammars and dictionaries that still form the basis and background for modern works in the same categories. As polyglots and language learners we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Please allow me one personal remark: rfnsoares is not totally correct in assuming that I put all my efforts and passion in writing over speaking. At home, I'm not very social and I don't like to speak through programs like Skype so it would be idiotic to let speaking ability be my primary goal and measure stick. But the situation changes when I'm travelling - there I try to use the local language as much as possible, and I don't think that it would be possible to learn to use a language actively even in writing without trying also to think in it - but the overwhelming majority of my input sources are written so I have decided not to take it too seriously if there are languages in which I can write, but still not speak well enough to have conversations.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Alexander Arguelles has been one of my main inspirations since I joined HTLAL. His shadowing method resonated very well with what I was doing at the time. I still use the spreadsheet. I remember finding Steve Kaufmann inspiring as well (back then, there just weren't that many around speaking 10+ languages). I read his book which he offered for free as a PDF. This was before LingQ. They may have different approaches but I find both of them worthwhile exploring.

[zjones]

I prefer not to have personal idols as inspiration for my learning, as I tend to put them on too high a white horse and then they fall off and that can be discouraging. I do, however, like taking inspiration from individuals from all different levels -- not just the best or the most successful people, but those who really work hard and challenge themselves. Often these are just everyday people. There's this lady at my weight-training class who is always jumping to put on a little more weight with each set, and she gets really excited about it. I like that. My artistic older sister is homeschooling her kids and also improving her own education (she's teaching a Latin course and a clay-modeling class at her homeschool co-op this year). She loves to discuss Malcom Gladwell's podcasts and all kinds of random things like architecture and mythology, and she is always excited to learn something new.

I try to have the same attitude when I approach my French. What's hard? How can I improve it? Okay! Let's do that! Yay!

[StringerBell]

I really enjoy reading Donovan Nagal's articles on the Mezzofanti Guild website. I think I've read most his archive at this point.